Wooden house

Houten Huis is a wooden building from around 1528 in the Begijnhof district. This is one of the oldest houses in Amsterdam and one of the other two houses with a wooden facade in this city.

The house has stone side walls, a wooden facade at the front and back, and a characteristic medieval attic. Houten Huis was built by a wealthy benefactor for lonely women belonging to the secular beginek religious association.

Since the founding of the city, all residential buildings in Amsterdam have been built of wood. In 1521, after a series of catastrophic fires, the city council forbade the construction of wooden houses and buildings and had to be built of brick.

The building was for many years considered the oldest standing wooden house in the Netherlands. In 2012, at Warmoesstraat, behind a nineteenth-century house facade, a house from around 1485 was discovered, half a century older than the house in Begijnhof.